yep. quantum mechanics is weird shit. I just failed an exam on that kind of stuff :(
remember: Most of that is already 100 years old. Scientists didn't do nothing the whole time, so there is a good chance that even physics majors will never come close to understanding, what Hawking just told you.

Since it's relevant and it hasn't been posted in this rendition of this post, yet, I thought I would add that Lawrence Krauss did a great talk on 'A Universe from nothing' which goes into a bit more detail on a lot of the same topics as this episode: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ImvlS8PLIo
It's fantastic and well worth watching.

Huh. So all black holes have a cause, but this one is special and was not caused. That sounds exactly like so many of the fallacies we are constantly reasoning against.

Much more likely that something like the cyclical universe postulated before. Only instead of expansion followed by contraction, you'd have billions of years of an essentially cold universe (expansion then the stars wink out), wherein the black holes eventually shallow each other, then there's another bang.

I interpreted Hawking's statements as expedient rather than gnostic. We don't typically stop to acknowledge the minuscule chance of unfalsifiable fairies or boogeymen- so why do that for god? Yes, an apologist might hijack it for a specious argument- but, even as an agnostic, I still find it ridiculous to repeatedly acknowledge minuscule and chimerical possibilities in speech.

when the whole reason of the episode is to convince me there is no god... though there were insightful things said... i think that he should either acknowledge every possibility, build some generalizations, or get a more suitable thesis....

the existence of a god does not seem such an unbelievable thing to me (judeo-christian, that is another matter). There is a creation, therefore it does not seem completely unrealistic to imagine there might be a creator....
I thought he was going to talk more about the physics of how a universe could come about from nothing... all i really got was "quantum fluctuations, problem solved". and if this true and i just don't understand then he needs more physics in it... i understand how quantum fluctuations work with waveparticles, but not with the fabric of spacetime itself.

Perhaps you are right, and he was just being expedient and making pragmatic generalizations... i guess then my problem would be more with the people that took this episode to be 100% proof that there is no god. The episode was good for what it was, but perhaps it was oversold to me beforehand.

If you're going to define God as "whatever makes/made things happen," well then the view that quantum fluctuations caused the Big Bang inflation is a form of deism. It's very fallacious to assume that whatever caused the universe is self-aware or even an entity of any form.

When people bring up that form of God (the one that makes gravity happen), I start thinking of idiots thinking that the sun's movement was controlled by somebody in a control room. It's rather inane to assume that a cause has to be self-aware.

nothing new to me. Hawking writes popular scientific books, I knew about his argumentation, that time started with the big bang. I think this argumentation is flawed. I don't see how "There was no time before the big bang" and "events before the big bang have no causal connection to events after it (because of totally symmetric singularity or whatever)" are distinguishable. Seems like an illegitimate assumption to me. Fun fact: Special relativity doesn't state, that velocities above the velocity of light are forbidden either.

Even the possibility of examining something like near-big-ban-events is doubtful, so I don't know how this can be considered scientifically accurate. He didn't really went further into the point, that god can break the rules. Someone could program a simulation with little ants, and the ants will figure everything out and be sure, that their universe is infinite and started in a singularity. What about the point of the fine tuned universe? Origin of laws and constants? Parallel universes? Such things are seriously considered for quantum field theory.

Pretty low level. Might be good, to give some people an idea of what is going on but for me it's too provocative. I hear, they will show this on FOX? Could really have been more subtle.

you are right about the dimensions. That's where the multiverse theory come in. Our universe could be just one of the billion other universes popping out of a parent "dimension".

I agree Hawking's reasoning is kind of weak, but with all the collective evidence we've known so far, we have a pretty good and educated idea that our universe wasn't created by a god, specially the biblical god with a personality.

I can't believe you're getting downvoted for pointing out the flaw in this line of reasoning. I don't believe God created the universe either. It's a given that the omnipotent omnibenevolent being which is usually assumed by those who use the label doesn't exist; that doesn't mean Hawking's argument is sound.

Did this episode link Aristotle with heliocentrism? I thought the Aristotelian system was geocentric.

I thought Hawking and Penrose retracted their singularity mathematics because of quantum mechanics. Am I wrong? If not, why did Hawking say that there was no time before the Big Bang? Also, if nothing can exist/happen in the absence of time, then how did the Big Bang happen? Or is it simply limited to existences rather than events (ie things happen but entities don't exist)?

I'm not that well grounded in quantum mechanics, but as far as I understand it, the argument is that subatomic particles follow laws that do not depend on causality and are thus "random" in the sense that time plays no role.

Aristotle was the first guy to come up with the concept of the Heliocentric model of the solar system. Hypertia rediscovered it afterwards inspired by Aristotle as some of his work was stored in the Library of Alexandria, to be tortured and killed by a mob of Christians. Only for it to be about 1200 years until Galileo to rediscover it again... to be tortured by the Spanish Inquisition for several years.

Sorry, I'm not equipped mentally to answer your second question, I'm just going to have to say "I don't know" on that one.

so the universe was infinitely small and infinitely dense inside a black hole then (if I'm following this right) it exploded? or the universe WAS a black hole then exploded? I'm sorry but that just doesn't make sense to me, I get the physics of it just not how that was the way the universe was made

I'd have like to have watched those. Unfortunately, all I get is a message telling me that they are no longer available as the account has been terminated due to multiple third-party complaints of copyright infringement. I suppose we'll just have to get used to seeing a lot more of that message.